Tuesday

Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan Talks Media

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder of Simulmedia, is a media
legend and a serial entrepreneur, who sees the value of media in prescient
ways.

His company’s latest
initiative, to be announced this week, is the roll-out of the licensing of
its software product called Vamos that will enable marketers to drive their own
campaigns to make their TV ads to be more targeted, similar to the web. Morgan
sees great disruption in the media industry over the next few years and has
strong opinions about the introduction of blockchain technology to media as
well as how to best approach attribution.

I sat down with him and asked him the following questions:

Charlene Weisler:
Where do you see the media challenges in the next couple of years?

Dave Morgan: I think that the challenges we will have over
the next couple of years are probably the ones that we have anticipated, maybe
over-anticipated, in the last decade or two. We are getting to a moment in time
where the advertising and marketing industry is going to confront several
really significant realities:

One: Are marketers prepared to really make their advertising
or marketing operations a profit center and not a cost center? I see the entry
of really significant and smart private equity firms into the consumer brand
space and the retail space. Whether that is 3G and Burger King or whether that
is looking at the folks that took over PetSmart and are now buying Chewy. You
will have really smart, numbers driven people who are not just about cutting
costs – they are actually very smart people – but smart investment people. They
are going to start at structurally changing industries, many times through
smarter marketing.And that is going to
have an impact on people who just view advertising and marketing as a cost
center without connecting the dots to how you actually drive profits and value
and create customers. So that is one bucket.

The other bucket is what we have always talked about and
that is that silos will inevitably come apart - The idea that different media
or different marketing are valued differently and measured differently. If we
become more results focused, cost focused, then it is really easy to figure out
what is the common currency. This is something you and I have talked about for
many years – how do you build out a multi-channel currency. It is hard to build
out a multi-channel currency if you are trying to equate a cost of an audit
bureau circulation number for a newspaper with a BPA number for a magazine,
with an ad server impression number for a banner with a YouTube number with a
Facebook number with a Nielsen Arbitron number for radio and a Nielsen C3 or C7
or C30 for TV and a comScore / Rentrak number for a secondary currency. That is
hard to pull them together and equate them at the commodity level, which
everybody does. But if you focus only on the output, sales or exactly how many
people did I reach (which is also sales), that is really all that matters. We
are on the cusp of bringing all research together – experimental design and
scientific method – all of that is going to come together and that will
probably be the most disruptive thing in our industry.

Weisler: How will
blockchain technology impact media?

Morgan: It’s a big question. It’s like saying ‘How will
electricity impact media?’ Blockchain
is the core building block technology. Most people know it today because it
powers bitcoin which creates a lot of preconceptions and maybe controversy. But
fundamentally it is a transparent, de-centralized ledger system that lets you
take what would have otherwise been a spreadsheet or a ledger and be able to
share it with thousands, tens of thousands of different processors to be able
to solve some computing tasks. And the ones that tend to work best are very
hard to compute. But very easy to verify. In the bitcoin world it verifies what
you have in the bank, in your wallet, and in the advertising world it will be
one of the ways to verify ad delivery. It is a very interesting way to attack
things like viewability and fraud because if you could never afford to look at
all of the internet protocol addresses of all impression deliveries at the
browser level across every supplier. It
is highly de-centralized, really efficient and verified against every other
point.

Weisler: As well as
being privacy compliant and secure as in bitcoin.

Morgan: Right, privacy compliant so you can put out the data
anonymized. Now, it is transparent as to its result but it can be anonymized as
to its consumer source.

Weisler: I consider
attribution to be a very big challenge. Where do you see the perfection of
attribution?

Morgan: I say that attribution is in the eye of the
beholder. It is going to be determined by the marketer, not by the people who
are selling the service. Sure, they will apply their own data as they think it
will help in attribution but it is going to be determined by those that sell
things. It will always be an imperfect science but it is becoming a better and
better science. And science doesn’t just mean focus groups. Science really
means being able to understand the multivariate impact. Of different commercial
communication and determining what actually impacts sales. And it not just
about classic last click, last exposure but it is really understanding what are
those critical heavy swing purchasers and understanding category buyers and understanding
the impact on them. And this will be done in a very proprietary way.

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About Me

Data revenue-generator expert. Research experience spanning broadcast, cable, off-platform, non-linear and broadband as well as set top box data, SEO, metrics creation and behavioral psychography. Expertise in leveraging datasets for revenue generation and sales positioning. Weisler writes about data, research and the media for several industry publications in addition to her blog. Email her at WeislerMedia at yahoo and follow her at www.twitter.com/weislermedia